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Каспинфо сентябрь 2001 |
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Название: Проблема сохранения осетровых на англ. языке Главные Пункты: * В результате сброса отработанной воды с электростанции в бассейнах, где разводили осетровых, температура поднялась до 99 градусов по Фаренгейту (около 37 С), что вызвало масcовую гибель рыбы. (19.09.2001) Полный Текст Проблема сохранения осетровых на англ. языке Проблема сохранения осетровых на англ. языке *** Killing the caviar Marcus Warren's email from Russia THESE are tough times for caviar-lovers. If you are partial to those tiny, salty, greyish fish eggs but, increasingly, cannot afford to indulge your taste for the delicacy, remember this small town on the banks of the River Volga. The end, when it came for the fish, was long, drawn out and painful. Instead of replenishing the world's stocks of this black gold, Russia's prime breeding sturgeon were slowly poached - boiled that is, not hunted - to death. It took years for a farm here to nurture its sturgeon, their mission to help reverse the species' catastrophic decline in the wild. It took less than a day and a night to turn their pens into tureens of fish soup. Overfishing in the Caspian Sea is to blame for the dwindling numbers of The fish in the wild and a crisis in the international caviar market. Here, upriver, the presence of a huge power station next to the farm provoked a smaller scale but no less dramatic disaster. Destroyed in a matter of hours this summer was a unique selection of Sturgeon family members, from the tiny sterlet and the larger bester up to enormous 130 lb-plus beluga, the latter specially reared to spawn in captivity. Local authorities have now opened a criminal investigation into the incident. But all parties accept that the power station's pumping of hot water into A canal servicing the farm was a major factor in the tragedy. Over a period of just four hours the water temperature in the fish pens soared from 73 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit, farm workers say. The result was a mass outbreak of fatal heat stroke. Starved of oxygen, the fish began jumping and poking their heads out of the water. Then they dived to the bottom of their pools in a vain attempt to keep cool. "For sturgeon a rise in temperature of that order produces the same sort of shock as that suffered by humans if you drop them in boiling water," said the farm's director, Olga Solovyova. Desperate phone calls to the power station, one of the largest in the former Soviet Union, got the farm's staff nowhere. During one Mrs Solovyova was Told to "start praying", she said. However, the power station's management blames the accident on a combination of a July heatwave that lasted the whole month and incompetence at the farm itself. "I feel no guilt," said Nikolai Baldin, its director. "We broke no rules or regulations. Nothing extraordinary happened that day. The farm should have moved the fish to other tanks when the Volga's temperature rose earlier in the month." Whoever was at fault, farm workers waded into the pools to try and give the fish their equivalent of the kiss-of-life - shaking them by the tail to force more oxygen through their gills. "We were up all night for two nights," recalled Larissa Selina, one of those who tried to save the fish. "You could see them dying. Most ended up floating, belly-up, on the surface." Only a small fraction of the carcasses could be saved as meat. Most of them were used as fertiliser or buried. So heavy were the dead beluga that three farm workers were needed to haul each one out of the pools. The death toll from the incident was still rising when I visited last month. 1,200 fish weighing six and a half tons had perished so far and the after-effects of heat shock were still killing those that survived, mostly small sterlets. The losses were also a personal tragedy for the farm staff. So familiar were some of the beluga that workers had christened them with nicknames such as "Vasya" and "Masha". The farm, 170 miles north east of Moscow, practised a Caesarean section technique to remove eggs from the fish every two years. The resulting scars left individual fish instantly recognisable. This year's batch of more than a million three-month old baby fish was released by the farm into the Volga before disaster struck. Now, however, the farm has to launch its breeding programme again from scratch. "We have been put back six years," said Mrs Solovyova. "That stock of sturgeon was part of the Volga's future." #13 Electronic Telegraph 11 September 2001 |